True Story

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Whilst scanning the receipt for my MacBook (which I needed to do to validate the purchase date and get the broken battery replaced) the battery in my MacBook Pro failed.

Point the Camera at the Screen

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I’m getting ready for my DevDays session later this week. I’m demonstrating some .NET Micro Framework devices that are a bit small, and so I thought I’d use a webcam to show close-ups of the toys. I was testing it just now and of course I pointed it at the screen.

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Cool eh?

If you are going to DevDays then feel free to come along. The Geek Night should be great fun.

Windows 7 is Speeding Me Up

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Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.

In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.

Windows 7

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Decided to celebrate my completion of everything by putting Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop. I did an upgrade, which seems to have worked fine except for my Nero InCd service, which I didn’t even know I had.

The desktop looks much nicer and seems quite a bit snappier than before. The system has even spotted the broken battery and told me that I might need to buy a new one, which is quite clever.

Nick of Time

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Is the art of good planning where you have everything ready months in advance and just watch the deadline arrive with cool detachment? Or is it when you have things finished just in time, and finish within minutes of the due date?

I always try to aim for the first one, but then end up doing the second. But the good news is that the book is now complete and the Dare to Dream Different video is now with Microsoft.

And now I’ve no idea what to do with myself.

Making Movies

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I quite like programming. You can take an idea and just make it happen. And every now and then you end up making something much more wonderful than you thought it would be when you started.

Making videos seems quite different to this. You start off with all the ideas OK, but when you try to film them you end up with something quite different you then have to hammer into some kind of shape, and you don’t end up anywhere near where you started.

However, both do have one thing in common, in that they seem to take twice as long as you thought, even if you you allow for this.

My original plan was to make a video in one 10 minute take. The batteries in the camera were up for this, but they turned out to be the only thing that was. And I have always regarded myself as a natural video performer, but this is unfortunately not how the camera sees me.

Anyhoo, Ian came round with Andy as cameraman and we managed to get a good chunk of video “in the can” as the professionals call it. The only problem was that for the group shot of “Team Building” as we call ourselves (well, I thought it was funny) the camera exposure seemed to have gone a bit awry, in that all you could see of me and Ian was eyes and teeth. And they are not necessarily our best features.

So I’ve made a rough cut of a few bits and pieces and we have having a reshoot of some scenes tomorrow. I know how Steven Spielberg feels now.

Great Service from Griffin

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For some time I’ve been looking for a gadget that l can use to play my music in the car. The previous vehicle had a cassette player, and so I got one of those “fake cassettes” that let me connect my MP3 player of the day into the sound system.

Then, thanks to some rather off-putting clunking noises when I went over bumps, I swapped my old car for a newer, shinier one. What with progress and the like, the new car of course had a CD player. I tried putting the fake cassette into the slot and it wouldn’t fit. So that was that.  I burnt a few disks of my favourites and just played them.

A few weeks ago the urge to play MP3s in the car returned though, mainly because I fancy being able to listen to podcasts and the like. Eventually I settled on a Griffin RoadTrip, because it doesn’t have any trailing wires. It just plugs into your cigarette lighter (I wonder if anyone still uses those things to light cigarettes) and you attach your MP3 player to the other end. It finds the quietest parts of the FM spectrum and then uses them broadcasts your tracks, including the RDS data, into your car radio. And it works a treat with the iPhone. I had to pad out the fitting with a bit of insulating tape to get a nice snug fit with the connector and stop the whole thing from slowly rotating out of the socket, but apart from that it worked fine.

Then I tried to use it with my five month old iPod. Which, of course, is an old model. The RoadTrip comes with a bunch of adapters  which doesn’t include my apparently ancient and unsupported one. This reflects a kind of lack of foresight on my part I guess, but we’ll gloss over that.  I sent Griffin an email bemoaning this and they instantly came back and said they’d post me a missing adapter. It arrived today, all the way from the USA. Great stuff. In these days of the internet and telephone helplines it is nice to see that some companies keep the idea of good service alive.

Are you a “Best Banker” or do you have the “Strongest Pong”

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Today and tomorrow I am going to be mostly in the practical labs marking first year programming work. The students can produce either an implementation of a Bank Account management program or an XNA version of the Pong game and they have to show it off and chat about how it works. The marking is is very time consuming, but I love doing it because it lets me chat to the students and see what they can really do.

To make things even more interesting I’ve produced some stickers which anyone who gets more than 90% will get either a “Best Banker” or “Strongest Pong” sticker.

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Well, could you get one?